A pro-poor development organization, PUSH AFRICA, has launched a nation-wide initiative seeking to redirect the attention of politicians and policymakers to urgently address challenges posed by escalating poverty in the country.
The initiative tagged DO ONE THING CAMPAIGN is designed to support the Nigerian government’s effort to reduce the number of poor people in the country by half.
Founder of PUSH AFRICA, Doris Egbaramen stated this in Abuja on Monday said the campaign is also directed at supporting similar anti-poverty initiatives by development agencies and private sector institutions.
According to her, a key objective of the campaign is to focus the attention of prospective leaders who are aspiring to vie for various political offices to give priority attention to the raging increase in the number of poor people in the country.
And to demonstrate that Nigerian people have practical and actionable plan to tackle pervasive and deepening poverty in their various constituencies.
“A key component of the campaign is to create a platform where Nigerians most hit by poverty can tell their own stories as it affects them so as to show the depth and harsh realities they live with.
She said that by exposing the vulnerable conditions in which they the poor live, the nation’s elected and appointed leaders will be encouraged to take serious and actionable steps towards solving their problems.
According to her, statistics show that about 95.1 million Nigerians – close to half of the country’s population still live below the poverty line.
“This current situation is disturbing and if we are not intentional about this issue, the statistics will get worse and the consequences in terms of negative socio-economic impact and underdevelopment will keep getting worse.
” For the sake of the current and future generations, we cannot allow this to happen. As an organization, we are indeed concerned about this hike hence the urgent call to do something drastic and practically so about this poverty pandemic in this country,” Egberamen said.
She also noted that poverty is linked to many negative vices such as inadequate nutrition and food insecurity, lack of access to health care, insecurity, homelessness, unsafe neighborhoods and it is also linked to corruption which adversely impact our nation’s wellbeing.
While acknowledging the current administration’s efforts in the terms of the will shown by the president, PUSH AFRICA believes that there is a need to re- examine the current efforts to find out why the poor are getting poorer despite the policy prescriptions being implemented.
“We need to check how well the solutions being administered are working and detect problematic areas that need to be focused on and improved. We need to check to see if it is really working because the numbers in the states are not encouraging,”she stated.
The pro-poor organization believes that the current political season and the expected emergence of a new administration presents a good opportunity to be more intentional and strategic about poverty and make it the number one priority since it affects a majority of the Nigerian population directly and indirectly.
The main goals of the DO-ONE-THING campaign are: To promote socio- economic justice for poor people in Nigeria. To ensure that the government formulates or adopts sustainable plans and policies to help redress the poverty, unemployment, health and housing problems of the poor throughout the country among others.